Perficient continues to be recognized in the industry as a leader in commerce strategy and implementation, achieving awards from partners and industry organizations as well as inclusions in key analyst reports. Our experts’ insights on distributed and dynamic commerce strategies, including distributed channels such as social media, influencer content, shoppable media, and GenAI as a catalyst for dynamic interactions, have been fueling conversations both with our clients and on the show floor of major industry tradeshows.

Most recently, Perficient was interviewed by Forrester for insights into the landscape of commerce in the United States. We believe our inclusion in The Future of Commerce (US), Distributed And Dynamic Commerce Strategies Pave The Way To Intelligent Commerce by Chuck Gahun reflects Perficient’s commitment to innovation within an ever-changing commerce landscape, as well as our ability to construct high-impact solutions that evolve as AI becomes more prevalent in commerce strategies.

Our Key Takeaways: Consumers Demand Smarter Commerce

While much has changed since the inception of ecommerce, some core truths still stand the test of time. Consumer confidence remains a crucial factor throughout the shift from in-store to online shopping. Brand value significantly contributes to consumer confidence and has grown in importance, especially regarding customer lifetime value and affinity. To keep pace with changes, there is an increased demand for AI and intelligent commerce.

Intelligent commerce is defined in two ways:

1. Commerce that will inherently evolve from assisted and anticipatory to agentic.
2. Consumer emotion is included as part of the equation.

Intelligent commerce interactions of this type will find ways for agentic models to understand emotion, sentiment, and dialect to make recommendations, truly bringing immersive shopping to life in a channel-less fashion.

“The shift to agentic commerce will introduce emotional elements at every interaction with consumers, thus deepening their connection to these brands,” says Justin Racine, Principal, Commerce Strategy.

Companies are finding ways to incorporate AI into experiences throughout the customer journey. We’re beginning to see what’s now known as “phygital,” a blending of traditional screens for shopping and their incorporation into daily life.

Omnichannel for Overall Better Commerce

Omnichannel initiatives can be costly and time-consuming. At Perficient, we’ve helped many clients navigate this complex maze by creating seamless omnichannel experiences, from sentiment analysis to contact center and chatbot creation and training.  However, the Forrester report states, “Only 21% of B2C business and technology professionals report their organization is prioritizing efforts to improve omnichannel initiatives, but consumer expectations for omnichannel experiences are higher than ever — across all consumer cohorts.” This dissonance between prioritization and consumer expectation will lead to major needs for increased commerce innovations in the future, especially if customer experience is to be at the forefront to nurture lasting relationships with audiences at every touchpoint.

Brands are looking for ways to connect more with customers and create experiences that resonate across channels, depending on where customers are in the process. With hyper-personalization and AI, customer data points around behavior can be synthesized through AI to create experiences that resonate with those customers.

Explore how to leverage customer data and utilize generative AI to help guide your omnichannel solutions.

Access the report here (available to Forrester subscribers or for purchase).

Recently, the news broke that Optimizely acquired Netspring, a warehouse-native analytics platform.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t heard of Netspring before, but after taking a closer look at their website and capabilities, it became clear why Optimizely made this strategic move.

Simplifying Omnichannel Analytics for Real Digital Impact

Netspring is not just another analytics platform. It is focused on making warehouse-native analytics accessible to organizations of all sizes. As businesses gather more data than ever before from multiple sources – CRM, ERP, commerce, marketing automation, offline/retail – managing and analyzing that data in a cohesive way is a major challenge. Netspring simplifies this by enabling businesses to conduct meaningful analytics directly from their data warehouse, eliminating data duplication and ensuring a single source of truth.

By bringing Netspring into the fold, Optimizely has future-proofed its ability to leverage big data for experimentation, personalization, and analytics reporting across the entire Optimizely One platform.

Why Optimizely Acquired Netspring

Netspring brings significant capabilities that make it a best-in-class tool for warehouse-native analytics.

With Netspring, businesses can:

• Run Product Analytics: Understand how users engage with specific products.
• Analyze Customer Journeys: Dive deep into the entire customer journey, across all touchpoints.
• Access Business Intelligence: Easily query key business metrics without needing advanced technical expertise or risking data inconsistency.

This acquisition means that data teams can now query and analyze information directly in the data warehouse, ensuring there’s no need for data duplication or exporting data to third-party platforms. This is especially valuable for large organizations that require data consistency and accuracy.

Ready to capitalize on these new features? Contact Perficient for a complimentary assessment!

The Growing Importance of Omnichannel Analytics

It’s no secret that businesses today are moving away from single analytics platforms. Instead, they are combining data from a wide range of sources to get a holistic view of their performance. It’s not uncommon to see businesses using a combination of tools like Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Qualtrics, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics.
How?

These tools allow organizations to consolidate and analyze performance metrics across their entire omnichannel ecosystem. The need to clearly measure customer journeys, marketing campaigns, and sales outcomes across both online and offline channels has never been greater. This is where warehouse-native analytics, like Netspring, come into play.

Why You Need an Omnichannel Approach to Analytics & Reporting

Today’s businesses are increasingly reliant on omnichannel analytics to drive insights. Some common tools and approaches include:

• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): These platforms collect and unify customer data from multiple sources, providing businesses with a comprehensive view of customer interactions across all touchpoints.
• Marketing Analytics Tools: These tools help companies measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns across digital, social, and offline channels. They ensure you have a real-time view of campaign performance, enabling better decision-making.
• ETL Tools (Extract, Transform, Load): ETL tools are critical for moving data from various systems into a data warehouse, where it can be analyzed as a single, cohesive dataset.

The combination of these tools allows businesses to pull all relevant data into a central location, giving marketing and data teams a 360-degree view of customer behavior. This not only maximizes the return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts but also provides greater insights for decision-making.

Navigating the Challenges of Omnichannel Analytics

While access to vast amounts of data is a powerful asset, it can be overwhelming. Too much data can lead to confusion, inconsistency, and difficulties in deriving actionable insights. This is where Netspring shines – its ability to work within an organization’s existing data warehouse provides a clear, simplified way for teams to view and analyze data in one place, without needing to be data experts. By centralizing data, businesses can more easily comply with data governance policies, security standards, and privacy regulations, ensuring they meet internal and external data handling requirements.

AI’s Role in Omnichannel Analytics

Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a pivotal role in this vision. AI can help uncover trends, patterns, and customer segmentation opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed. By understanding omnichannel analytics across websites, mobile apps, sales teams, customer service interactions, and even offline retail stores, AI offers deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences.

This level of advanced reporting enables organizations to accurately measure the impact of their marketing, sales, and product development efforts without relying on complex SQL queries or data teams. It simplifies the process, making data-driven decisions more accessible.

Additionally, we’re looking forward to learning how Optimizely plans to leverage Opal, their smart AI assistant, in conjunction with the Netspring integration. With Opal’s capabilities, there’s potential to further enhance data analysis, providing even more powerful insights across the entire Optimizely platform.

What’s Next for Netspring and Optimizely?

Right now, Netspring’s analytics and reporting capabilities are primarily available for Optimizely’s experimentation and personalization tools. However, it’s easy to envision these features expanding to include content analytics, commerce insights, and deeper customer segmentation capabilities. As these tools evolve, companies will have even more ways to leverage the power of big data.

A Very Smart Move by Optimizely

Incorporating Netspring into the Optimizely One platform is a clear signal that Optimizely is committed to building a future-proof analytics and optimization platform. With this acquisition, they are well-positioned to help companies leverage omnichannel analytics to drive business results.

At Perficient, an Optimizely Premier Platinum Partner, we’re already working with many organizations to develop these types of advanced analytics strategies. We specialize in big data analytics, data science, business intelligence, and artificial intelligence (AI), and we see firsthand the value that comprehensive data solutions provide. Netspring’s capabilities align perfectly with the needs of organizations looking to drive growth and gain deeper insights through a single source of truth.

Ready to leverage omnichannel analytics with Optimizely?

Start with a complimentary assessment to receive tailored insights from our experienced professionals.

Connect with a Perficient expert today!
Contact Us

Let’s be honest: today’s customers expect a lot. They want to browse your website on their laptop, check prices on their phone, maybe ask a question on social media — and they expect it all to feel easy and connected.

If your brand can’t keep up? They’ll notice — and they’ll move on.

That’s why omnichannel experiences are no longer a nice-to-have. They’re essential. And platforms like Optimizely are helping businesses pull it all together — so customers enjoy a seamless journey no matter where they start or finish.

Let’s break it down — and show a few real examples along the way.

What Exactly Is an Omnichannel Solution?

In simple terms: omnichannel means every touchpoint with your brand feels connected.

Your website, your app, your emails, your store — they’re all telling the same story, with the same tone, look, and feel. Customers can jump between channels without feeling lost, confused, or annoyed.

Example:
Imagine a customer finds a jacket they love on your Instagram ad, clicks through to your site, adds it to their cart, and later finishes buying it from your app — without skipping a beat. That’s omnichannel.

How Optimizely Makes It Happen

Optimizely isn’t just a CMS — it’s a full digital experience platform built to make this stuff way easier (and a lot less manual). Here’s how it helps:

One Place to Manage All Your Content

Optimizely’s CMS lets you create and update content for all your channels — websites, apps, emails — from one dashboard. No more juggling five different tools and hoping everything matches. You set it up once and it flows everywhere.

Example:
Launching a new product? Update the description and images once inside Optimizely, and it’s automatically live on your site, app, and promotional emails — all with the same branding and messaging.

Personalization That Feels Natural

Not every customer is the same — and they shouldn’t get the same experience either.

Optimizely lets you segment your audience by things like location, behavior, or purchase history. So you can show the right content, at the right time, to the right person — without feeling creepy.

Example:
Someone browses hiking gear on your site. Next time they open your app, they see a “Top Picks for Your Next Adventure” banner — not a random sale on winter boots.

Try, Test, and Tweak (Without the Guesswork)

Not sure if a new homepage layout will boost clicks? Wondering if a different CTA (“Shop Now” vs. “Explore More”) will perform better?

With Optimizely’s A/B testing tools, you don’t have to guess. You test, measure, and roll out the winner — fast.

Real Insights, Not Just Pretty Charts

Optimizely gives you real-time data on how people are moving across your channels. You’ll know what’s working, what’s lagging, and where customers are dropping off — so you can fix it before it becomes a problem.

Example:
Notice a bunch of shoppers are ditching their carts in your app? Maybe the checkout flow needs some love — and now you know where to focus.

Plug and Play with Your Favorite Tools

Already using Salesforce, Marketo, or other customer tools? Optimizely easily integrates with them. That way, your teams have a 360-degree view of every customer interaction without extra headaches.

Why It Matters (and Why It Works)

When you build omnichannel solutions with Optimizely, a few good things happen:

• Your customers feel seen and valued — and they stick around longer.

• Your teams work smarter, not harder — no more duplicate content creation or random marketing campaigns.

• Your marketing actually lands — because it’s personalized, timely, and relevant.

• Your decisions get sharper — fueled by real customer data, not gut feelings.

At the end of the day, customers don’t think in “channels.” They just want things to work — and to feel personal, effortless, and connected along the way.

Optimizely gives businesses the tools to make that happen — to meet customers wherever they are, keep the journey seamless, and turn great experiences into real business results.

Because in today’s world, the brands that win are the ones that make things easy — and a little bit magical.

Omnichannel provides a seamless shopping experience across all channels, including in-store, mobile, and online means providing a consumer with the same inventory, pricing, and promotions across all channels. Availability, Buying, and Customer-service (A.B.C.) are the first building blocks for a great customer experience – Here’s what to consider

Availability:

Omnichannel starts with retailers’ ability to achieve higher inventory availability accuracy. Better visibility drives increased sales and traffic, integrates all customer touchpoints, and ensures the promise is made to the customer of when they will receive the goods they purchased.

Omnichannel availability can refer to several different things, including:

Inventory availability

• Omnichannel Inventory service provides APIs that can be used to get inventory availability data and manage reservations across fulfillment channels. It can also retrieve inventory updates from back-office systems like ERP, WMS, and POS. This inventory visibility gives retailers the ability to re-allocate items when needed and enables an improved shop-by-store experience for customers. Giving customers these real-time inventory insights is crucial for retailers across the globe. Google’s global research on countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States revealed that 46% of shoppers confirm inventory availability online before going to stores.

Store reach

• Omnichannel availability allows a store to extend its reach beyond its storefront through various channels, such as marketing and sales channels. Channel Manager in the control panel can be used to set up and manage these channels, as well as to see the status of connected channels, and to reconfigure or disable them.

Team availability

• Omnichannel Availability provides a centralized view of a team’s availability. This can help optimize customer support by assigning inquiries to the right agents.

Buying:

The omnichannel retail experience connects sales channels in the physical and digital worlds, creating a seamless shopping experience for customers. Omnichannel retailing connects a brand’s various modes of selling. Examples of ways customers are using omnichannel retail include. For retailers, activating inventory in stores by showing inventory online unlocks numerous benefits for the business, but each of the use cases below requires advanced logic to ensure the phygital divide is near seamless, creating a true omnichannel experience:

• Buy online and pick up in-store (BOPIS) : BOPIS is one of the most common examples of omnichannel retailing, and is becoming table stakes. When looking at how omnichannel retail increases sales, consider the fact that 54% of consumers say they are likely to look at a product online and then purchase it in-store, typically with the intent to buy in store – and BOPIS flows allow those items to be picked and set aside for them, for convenient delivery in-person at the store – at a time they choose.
• Buy online and return in-store (BORIS) : It’s an omnichannel strategy that belongs to the same group as BOPIS. In-store returns of products purchased online are soon to become an industry standard, as 47.6% of US retailers, including Walmart, Target, Costco and The Home Depot report an increase in the in-store return method in the past 12 months.
• Buy Online, Ship-to-Store (BOSS): Consumers buy products online through a local store even when they aren’t in stock.
• Ship From Store (SFS) : Ship from store is a fulfillment strategy where orders placed on an ecommerce platform are fulfilled at brick and mortar locations, rather than at a warehouse.

In coming years, 54% of consumers say they’re likely to look at a product online and buy in-store, and 53% are likely to look at a product in-store and buy online.

Customer Service:

Omni-channel customer service integrates text, social, email and instant messaging to provide a unified brand experience so that customers can switch between multiple channels yet still experience quality of service. Omni-channel customer service is the solution for forward-thinking businesses.

Mobile Service:

More people are searching on mobile phones and buying on mobile. Therefore, they’re also seeking customer service support on their mobiles. 90% of customers say their customer service experience on mobile was negative. And the same study found that 52% of customers say that poor mobile experience makes them less inclined to do business with a company.

Social media:

Social media can be a great customer service tool, resulting in high customer satisfaction rates. 32% of clients want an answer within 30 minutes and 57% of these clients expect the same turnaround on nights and weekends.

SMS:

Texting is a popular customer service platform for many industries. From placing to-go orders with restaurants via text to booking appointments and sending appointment reminders to responding to insurance claims via mobile, SMS is extremely versatile. When a client wants to reach out to a customer support agent, 52% of surveyed consumers said they would like to have the ability to do so via text message. While 47% said that texting would improve their overall customer service satisfaction.

Live chat:

Live chat is a very popular form of customer service with 63% of visitors being more likely to revisit a site that offers live chat. And 44% of consumers report that being able to get answers to their questions during a purchase is one of the most important features a website should offer.

Email:

Email wins hand-down as being the most effective digital marketing strategy for customer retention with 56% effectiveness, compared to 37% retention effectiveness with social media marketing and 8% effectiveness from mobile advertising.

The omnichannel approach is crucial in modern retail, integrating physical and digital experiences through Availability, Buying, and Customer Service (A.B.C.). This strategy ensures accurate inventory information, offers flexible purchasing options like BOPIS and BORIS, and provides seamless customer support across multiple channels. As consumer expectations evolve, retailers who successfully implement these omnichannel strategies will be better positioned to foster customer loyalty and drive growth in the competitive marketplace. The future of retail hinges on creating a unified, flexible shopping experience that effortlessly bridges the digital and physical realms. Contact us for more insights on Order Management and the omnichannel approach.

In today’s hyper-competitive retail landscape, merely processing orders is no longer sufficient. Businesses need a digital commerce solution that can create immersive online experiences, drive sales, and foster long-term customer loyalty. Salesforce Commerce Cloud stands out as a game-changer in this regard, and with Perficient as your trusted partner, you can unlock its full potential.

Why Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud transcends traditional shopping cart platforms. Here’s why it’s the ultimate choice for B2C businesses seeking growth and success:

Omnichannel Excellence:

Seamlessly unify your customer journey across all touchpoints, whether it’s through mobile apps, websites, social media, or brick-and-mortar stores. With Commerce Cloud, you can deliver consistent and personalized experiences that delight shoppers at every step of their buying journey.

AI-Powered Personalization:

Harness the power of Einstein AI to revolutionize how you engage with your customers. By analyzing vast amounts of data, Einstein enables you to deliver highly targeted product recommendations, personalized content, and compelling promotions that resonate with each individual shopper, driving higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Scalability and Security:

With Commerce Cloud, scalability and security are non-negotiable. Whether you’re experiencing a surge in traffic during peak seasons or expanding into new markets, Commerce Cloud can effortlessly handle the load while ensuring the utmost protection of sensitive customer data. Rest easy knowing that your platform is equipped with enterprise-grade security features to safeguard your business and customers.

Flexibility and Agility:

No two businesses are alike, and Commerce Cloud recognizes that. Enjoy unparalleled flexibility and agility as you customize your storefront to reflect your brand identity and unique value proposition. Additionally, Commerce Cloud’s seamless integration capabilities allow you to connect with other systems and third-party applications, enabling you to adapt quickly to changing market dynamics and stay ahead of the competition.

Perficient, the Commerce Cloud Experts

Implementing Commerce Cloud requires expertise. Perficient Inc. steps in as your trusted partner, bringing:

• Deep Expertise: Our team has expertise in Commerce Cloud solutions, understanding its nuances and intricacies.
• Strategic Guidance: We go beyond implementation, helping you define your commerce vision and craft a winning strategy.
• Seamless Integration: We connect Commerce Cloud with your existing systems, ensuring smooth data flow and optimized operations.
• Ongoing Support: We’re here every step of the way, providing ongoing maintenance, optimization, and strategic guidance.

Increased Efficiency, Soaring Revenue

Here’s what Perficient and Commerce Cloud can achieve for you:

• Reduced Time to Market: Launch your online store faster, capitalizing on market opportunities promptly.
• Streamlined Operations: Automate tasks, manage orders efficiently, and free up resources for strategic initiatives.
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Personalized experiences and omnichannel support lead to happier, more loyal customers.
• Boosted Conversion Rates: Targeted promotions, AI-powered recommendations, and a user-friendly interface drive more sales.
• Measurable Growth: Track key metrics and gain data-driven insights to optimize your strategy for continuous improvement.

Ready to unlock the true potential of your B2C commerce? Contact Perficient today and let’s discuss how we can tailor Salesforce Commerce Cloud to your unique needs and help you achieve your retail dreams.

For every company that tends to move forward with its customer experience and to form a successful content strategy, content management is one of the foremost imperative forms.

You are probably already familiar with traditional content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla and WordPress. But how is headless software different? A headless CMS is an answer to the new IoT (Internet of Things) era, where content needs to be delivered to multiple devices simultaneously and improve digital CX.

A headless CMS is a content management system that organizes content without the help of a website, a front-end presentation layer.
Without a “head”, you can use an application programming interface (API) to select different outputs for your content (website, mobile app, etc.). This allows you to seamlessly display your content across different devices.
In other words, headless architectures focus on delivering and storing content, not how it is displayed.

Headless CMS API types

API is an application programming interface that allows two apps to access data and work together. APIs are everywhere. For example, the Twitter Ads API allows marketers to promote their social profile accounts and create targeted social ads to reach their audience.
Since they are so versatile, let’s focus on two APIs related to headless systems.

GraphQL

GraphQL is an open-source API language for data querying developed by Facebook. This language was born to accommodate less flexible RESTful applications that can save bandwidth.
More specifically, this language allows us to answer queries by simply representing the information in our database. This way you can easily request the data you want and get the relevant results.

REST API

REST stands for Representational State Transfer and is a set of constraints that follow a particular architectural style. This structure allows REST APIs to interact with RESTful services.
In implementing this pattern, the client performs a representational state transfer of the record. Specifically, the information is provided over HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) in the following format:

• JSON
• PHP
• XLT
• HTML
• Python
• Plaintext

Overall, JSON is the most common format used to send resource representations to endpoints. This is due to readability and simplicity as well as cost-effectiveness and parsing speed.

Headless CMS Vs. Traditional CMS

A comparison table of headless and traditional content management systems:

Monolithic CMS

A traditional or “monolithic” CMS is a web development application that allows content authors to publish text and images on websites.

These Content Management Apps (CMAs) are “bonded together”. In short, you have everything you need to connect the database (body) to the presentation layer (head). As a result, you do not have to worry about updating content via HTML or FTP (File Transfer Protocol). A monolithic CMS is perfect for individuals, marketers, or business owners who want a simple tool to manage their websites from one place.

While traditional CMS is focused on creating content for a single website, modern systems have developed various plugins to allow users to share content on other devices.

Headless CMS

A headless CMS, on the other hand, focuses on the content repository (main body). That means that the data is stored but not displayed like in traditional systems.

This gives web developers more flexibility and allows them to use their favorite tools and programming languages ​​without restrictions. Compared to traditional systems, headless systems are ideal for publishing content to multiple platforms simultaneously while maintaining content responsiveness.

What about decoupled CMS?

The term “decoupled” is also used when talking about headless CMS. So, are a headless CMS and a decoupled CMS the same thing? They share some similarities (databases, API deployments, etc.), but a decoupled content management system allows you to create content and a formatted version can be presented to the end user.
Simply, a decoupled CMS combines the flexibility of a headless system with the ease of use of a monolithic CMS.

Benefits of headless content management

Of course, every system has advantages and disadvantages. A few points to consider before choosing a headless CMS platform.

Pros

• Seamless delivery of content across multiple platforms
• Improved omnichannel marketing approach
• Improved functionality
• No templates or themes required
• Front-end flexibility for you and your developers
• Ability to improve digital customer experience
• Easier management and maintenance of backend systems
• Improved content scalability

Cons

• More complex than traditional CMS
• Fewer personalization options
• More expensive in terms of infrastructure and development
• No content visualization for content editors and authors

As you can see, headless CMS has pros and cons. Ultimately, though, it’s up to you to weigh your options and make the final decision.

Headless CMS Use Case

To successfully promote your retail business, you need to provide your customers with a seamless digital experience. To make this happen, retail brands need to choose the right tools to make it happen.

A headless CMS helps retailers with multiple websites and web apps to grow in the highly competitive retail landscape. See how the big brands have done it!

For example, L’Oréal wanted to become the number-one digital beauty brand in the world. To make this happen, they got the Sitecore Experience Platform (XP). According to a case study, only 20% of their 3,000 websites generated traffic.

To fix this, they launched ‘The Website Factory’ to manage websites and improve the way content is organized and delivered. Results? Loading time has been reduced from 10 minutes to less than 3 minutes.

Implementing these changes was a big step for L’Oréal, which not only improved loading speed, but also achieved scalability in a cloud-based environment, improved their digital experience, and reinvented their marketing strategy.

When to you use a headless CMS?

Use a headless CMS if…

• Your marketing team wants to focus on your omnichannel content marketing strategy
• You want to give your customers the best user experience on all devices
• Want to consolidate content from multiple departments to avoid content duplication

Use a Monolithic (traditional) CMS if…

• Not focusing on creating digital experiences in other channels such as chatbots, apps, and virtual reality
• Not enough in-house experience or funding for normal front-end development
• You want to host CMS on your server

Common scenarios for using a headless CMS

Struggling to visualize use cases and scenarios that benefit from a headless CMS? Let’s look at some key examples.

Content Hub

Content duplication is common in large organizations because departments work in silos rather than in tandem when producing content. Placing multiple pieces of content on the same topic can lead to major conflicts and confusion about the exact content. In this case, using a headless architecture is a great option. Content Hub can bring all content sources together and collaborate in one central hub. Content can then be exported from Content Hub and delivered to channels such as websites and apps using API.

Omnichannel publishing

Retail brands that publish the same content for different audiences across multiple platforms such as websites, apps, e-commerce, chatbots and print media.
Marketing teams can benefit from a headless CMS to increase their content output. Make better use of your team’s resources by retrieving content from a single resource instead of duplicating content across multiple devices. Front-end developers can focus on creating the best user experience for each individual channel/device.

Summary

Headless CMS is certainly more than just a buzzword in the world of web development. It’s a major advancement in development that will bring you great benefits if you focus on delivering the best omnichannel experience to your customers. If content creation is a key part of your strategy, or if you are looking for something future-proof and flexible enough to grow with your business, a headless CMS could be your next solution.

Our very own Kim Williams- Czopek (General Manager, Commerce) sat down with Gary Schoch, (VP of Global GTM Software Leader Consumer Experience Portfolio at HCL Software) and other panelists at the HCL Commerce Global Summit 2022 to discuss customer experience, data, and omnichannel. You can watch the full conversation here.

Changes in Consumer Behavior and Its Effects on Omnichannel

Building a strong omnichannel strategy is a goal for all e-commerce businesses. The ability to provide the same inventory selections, pricing, and promotions across all channels (in-store, online, and mobile) is a good indication of an omnichannel strategy that works. However, consumer behavior and expectations, as they always do, are changing.

The biggest change that Kim Williams- Czopek has noticed in the past few years is that customers expect control. Czopek says that it is no longer a question of “can I?” But instead, a question of “why can’t I? And if I, can’t I’m gone.” This customer expectation expands to everything from where the customer shops, where they return, to where and when they get their stuff. Customers are not as patient as they once were, so that is why it is important to give all your customers a frictionless, consistent experience across all channels.

Do Not Be Afraid to Talk to Your Customers to Get Feedback

A lot of companies struggle to get direct customer input. The perception around research is that research is costly and time-consuming. There are a lot of tools available that can automate some of the feedback asynchronously. However, “nothing beats getting out in the field and talking to customers,” says Czopek. This could be in the form of a survey or a remote interview session, but this is where Czopek recommends starting. She states “it is important to first understand what your customers want, and how your operations are supporting that. Then you can figure out what to do with your technology and data to meet those needs.”

Helping Our Clients Get to Personalization at Scale

A lot of use cases that Perficient is currently focusing on are the ones that leverage data to deliver personalization and how to surface relevant and meaningful offers, communications, and self-service. We have a lot of clients making great headway in those areas.  Learn more about how we will use journey science to help you give your customers the personalization that they have come to expect.

When Does Data Really Hold Value?

Czopek emphasizes that “it is not about the technology, it never is, it is about the people and process.” Having all of the data and technology is great, but if you are missing the people who can answer to the business and explain the insights within, then your data is useless. Czopek explains this through a back and forth she witnessed between a CEO and the head of analytics:

CEO: “Why did we beat our comp yesterday?”

Head of Analytics: “Well I sent you the dashboard”

CEO: “Yeah but why did we beat our comp?”

Head of analytics: “Look at the dashboard.”

As you can see through this example, data is useless unless someone on your team can clearly communicate what the data is saying.

Less Rigidity Will Improve your Agility

A lot of companies struggle with building agility in their teams. We all learned just how important agility is from the Covid-19 pandemic. At the drop of a hat, everything can change, and you must adapt.

To build better agility in your teams it must come from the top down. Investing in training is also important, it might not be a scrum methodology specifically, but expand the notion of what agile means.

Importantly do what is best for the customer and start building processes and training programs around that. Less rigidity will help improve your agility because most people want to do the right thing and are smart, so if you give them the right tools and guidance, they will do it.

The Future of First-Party Data

Czopek “would love if first-party data was the end-all-be-all but right now it is not.” Right now, there just simply not enough interactions to validate all of the first-party data. With that being said, helping our clients move to first-party data is one of our top three outcome-driven objectives that we are working with. So, the question at hand here is how much data you need for your first-party data to be valid?

Learn More

 Reach out to one of our many experts to learn more about CX, Omnichannel, and data! Like what you heard from Kim Williams Czopek? Well, you can hear more from her on Perficient’s What If? So What? Podcast, where Kim Williams- Czopek and co-host Jim Hertzfeld discover what’s possible with digital and figure out how to make it real in your business.

Customers want to interact with a website that adapts to their needs, and as a result, the key segments of the modern customer digital experience are personalization and convenience. Customers not only expect the ability to make purchases or leave comments, but they also expect those interactions to be saved for the purpose of updated account preferences and future recommendations.

These same expectations are changing the world of customer service and contact center experience. To keep up with rising challenges, contact centers need to provide a personalized experience to their customers and this is where Segment comes in. It provides a unified customer profile that can be used to create a consistent and customized customer experience across multiple platforms.

Our team has been working to create a Segment / Twilio Flex integration that an agent can use to assist a customer, especially while they navigate through a connected website. Segment uses powerful tools to process customer data that Twilio Flex then channels through a customizable user-friendly interface. This integration paves the way for a more efficient contact center and its use cases include:

• Enabling agents to view the customer journey to quickly solve issues with a customer’s most recent order
• Allowing agents to change a customer’s preferred method of communication for marketing campaigns
• Adding and removing customers from marketing campaigns
• The automatic detection of customers across all contact channels, especially SMS and Voice
• Items left in a cart triggering an SMS message for a customer to which the customer can respond to receive help from an agent.

Creating a Source

There are a plethora of different kinds of sources that can funnel data into Segment. One of the most basic is the JavaScript source, which is simply any JavaScript-based application that sends data to the Analytics API. We utilized a retail-style website as our source and there we created a few hard-coded example users.

When a customer is selected an identify call is made. This call tells Segment that the customer has signed in and identifies the user as a unique profile. A unique customer identifier is included in the call and is used consistently throughout the website to identify the customer.

There are also several track calls made to the Analytics API. These correspond with key events such as adding an item to the cart or making a purchase. Whenever a customer performs one of these actions, a track call is sent. In addition to notifying Segment of the action itself, the track calls also provide any relevant information about the action, such as the name and the price of an item added to the cart.

Handling the data in Segment

The lovely thing about Segment is that it does all the heavy lifting. Once it receives the information, it automates all sorts of related tasks and data analytics. The info from the identify and track calls Segment received is gathered and sent to the Segment Personas platform to be refined. The Personas platform consists of the following tools – Profiles, Audiences, and Journeys.

The users and all their relevant data reside within the Profiles tool. Traits provided in identity calls, like name, email, and preferred contact method, show up here as Custom Traits. Custom Traits appear alongside values called Computed Traits, such as last purchase date and lifetime spend, which are calculated based on events or other traits.

Groups of users from the Profiles tool can be defined and calculated based on events and traits using the Audiences tool. These groups or “audiences” are analyzed based on common traits and behavioral patterns and they can also be imported into the Journeys tool where they can be singled out for channels like SMS and email campaigns.

Integrating Segment into a Twilio Flex Plugin

The key to putting all this data to work is in Twilio Flex. By integrating Segment into a Twilio Flex plugin, agents are not only given access to relevant customer information but also given the ability to edit customer info as needed.

It’s possible to query Segment for an individual customer profile through the Profile API and information such as user traits, events, external IDs, and more can be requested. In our plugin, we utilized the call and SMS external identifiers we defined to retrieve customer data depending on what channel the customer used to contact the contact center.

If a customer profile is found within Segment, their information is displayed in the CRM panel. If that is not the case, a form to add the customer’s information is displayed instead. Once this form is submitted, an identify call is sent to the Analytics API where Segment adds a new user to the list of profiles. Editing a customer’s contact info can be achieved with the same method, the primary difference being that when Segment receives the identify call it does not create a new profile. It updates the existing one with the new information instead.

Using a drop-down menu below the customer’s profile, the agent can add or remove the customer from any of the campaigns managed in Segment. This is done through a track call to the Analytics API that represents an Enroll or Unenroll action.  Campaigns provide a consistent point of contact with customers, and they can include anything from coupon email lists and SMS marketing campaigns to newsletters. Not only does this allow agents to efficiently enroll customers in relevant campaigns based on their profile, but it also gives customers more control over their privacy by making it easier to opt out of unwanted campaigns.

In the CRM panel, we can also find the entire customer journey that shows all the track events recorded for that user, capped at any specified number. For example, we capped our instance at 20 track events. By looking at these events, an agent can see what the customer is doing on the website and can better assist them.

Takeaway

In our project, we have only just scratched the surface of how Segment integrations can be used to enhance not only the Twilio Flex experience but also customer data management. With the versatility of Twilio Flex contact centers and the powerful customer data management of Segment, the possibilities are endless. We plan to continue delving into this topic and I encourage others to explore what this software power couple can do for them as well.

Why Perficient?

We are a Twilio Gold Partner with a team of certified Twilio Flex engineers and more than 20 years of experience delivering unparalleled customer engagement and contact center experience solutions. For more information on our Twilio Flex practice and capabilities visit us on our Twilio partner page!

Our life sciences and technology experts recently delivered the webinar, “Improve Medical Product Information Sharing With Virtual Agents,” where they discussed how automation and artificial intelligence can be used to optimize call center operations and improve end-user experiences.

Here are five key takeaways:

1. Just because a system is powered by AI doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice empathy. Systems can be designed to have a natural conversation flow and recognize whether a message is negative or positive. For example, suppose someone calls to inquire whether they should give their puppy more medicine because it vomited shortly after taking its dose. In that case, an AI system can be programmed to compassionately respond with, “I’m sorry to hear that,” before searching its database for the accurate medical advice to relay.
2. AI isn’t meant to replace the call agent, but rather, its purpose is to allow them to focus on higher-value escalations. The severity of adverse reactions and urgent HCP questions can vary significantly from case to case. Conversations with live agents can be prioritized and triaged to quickly route those calls to the best call center resource.
3. AI can help address specific call center challenges. Many pharmaceutical and medical call centers experience extremely high call volumes, especially at certain times of the year (i.e., flu season), resulting in unacceptably long wait times and excessive dropped calls. Call center agents are also challenged with having to meticulously record their interactions, which only exacerbates these issues. AI can use NLP to help address these issues and record interactions. The great thing is that it interfaces with current systems, works in any regulatory area (e.g., biologic, device, animal health, human health, dietary supplements), and can be deployed globally to overcome language barriers.
4. AI virtual agents can be fine-tuned to effectively handle various types of callers. For example, a virtual agent that speaks with doctors may be programmed to communicate using more medical vocabulary than a virtual agent designed to speak with patients.
5. An AI virtual agent delivered in a truly omnichannel capacity will greatly reduce frictions in the user experience. Suppose someone is experiencing an adverse reaction to a medication that gives them a sore throat. In that case, a texting method of communication may be better suited for them than a phone call, and AI systems can equip users with such options. If someone is at the point of sale and has questions about an OTC product or their prescription, they could easily text with questions or concerns.

READ MORE: 10 Questions & Answers About Using Virtual Agents for Medical Information Sharing

Curious to learn more? Watch the recording here or below.

Once you access your data, how do you leverage that data to drive business forward? This episode will outline how to monetize your data and gain the necessary competitive edge.

In season 1 episode 7 of the Intelligent Data Podcast, host Arvind Murali and his guest Pawan Gupta, Perficient’s Principal of Commerce and Omnichannel Services, discuss the impact data has on ecommerce, supply chain, and order management as well as key considerations such as data privacy and compliance.

Listening Guide

• The difference between global commerce implementation and domestic deployments [2:09]
• Geo-political issues and product distribution [4:23]
• data sets used in implementations [5:47]
• Process Mining [9:35]
• Visibility into end-to-end supply chain [13:51]
• Monetizing your data [16:22]
• How to enable insights and data analytics across the supply chain [18:14]
• Using AI to automate the supply chain process [21:04]
• Pricing strategy [25:25]
• Startups and commerce [26:01]
• Enabling digital marketing [28:10]
• Customers and data privacy [33:20] 

Get This Episode Where You Listen

And don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review!

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 Connect with the Host and Guest

Arvind Murali, Perficient Principal and Chief Strategist

LinkedIn | Perficient

Pawan Gupta Perficient Principal

LinkedIn

Learn More About Our Commerce Solutions

If you are interested in learning more about Perficient’s Commerce services capabilities or would like to contact us, click here.

Before we could blink, summer ended, and the holiday season is now just around the corner. The COVID-19 pandemic has already impacted several facets of digital commerce, and many businesses will have to make certain adjustments as holiday spend continues to move online.

Here are some tips that will prepare your business for the digital holiday commerce season.

Having the Most Updated Infrastructure

Having the most updated platform and technology stack possible is extremely important to take on holiday traffic. Your business’s technology infrastructure will need to be scalable to measure the surge of holiday sales, such as Black Friday where orders and online traffic will peak. You will want to be sure that your business does not run into any issues or vulnerabilities due to outdated technology.

Move Retail Stores Online

Most consumers are staying at home, meaning fewer are heading into stores and more are shopping online. Instead of allowing this to become a negative experience, businesses can turn this into a positive challenge in a few different ways.

Omnichannel is the New In-Store

Organizations are moving from relying on physical retail stores to omnichannel options such as buy-online, pick-up-in-store (BOPIS), ship-from-store, or curbside pick-up to fulfill consumer orders. If your retail store or business does not offer this feature, then investing in omnichannel features on your commerce website will be essential in fulfilling through alternate channels before the holiday season truly sets in.

Honing in On Order Management and Supply Chain

Invest in your order management and supply chain systems. Even though retail stores are quickly transitioning from in-person to online shopping, we are seeing an increase in responsibility placed on in-store associates for the upcoming holiday season, especially with supply chain management.

The more consumers opt for omnichannel delivery such as BOPIS or ship-from-store, the more employees will have to manage where products are coming and going. Employees will still have to work in-store in tandem with the omnichannel pick-up options. With the holiday surge, employees will need to rely on their supply chain and order management systems to make sure the product inventory reflected on the website is accurate, as well as which inventory is available in stores, warehouses, and so on.

Becoming Mobile-Friendly

With the majority of consumers moving to online shopping, your business will find that a large number of this traffic will come from mobile. Businesses will want to ensure that their mobile website or application is mobile-friendly, responsive, and can offer the same assistance to consumers through omnichannel pick-up options.

Implementing Tools to Keep Users Updated

While order management systems are key for managing inventory and orders, there are additional ways to take it a step further for greater order accuracy, such as capacity planning modules.

Capacity planning modules help your organization plan around when you can distribute orders to consumers based on employee availability and the number of orders that come in at a specific time. The module will measure out these factors and determine when a timeslot is available for consumers to pick up orders. An email notification is sent to the customer confirming their order is ready for pick-up to help you distribute orders effectively and assure customers when they will receive their order.

The Bottom Line for This Holiday Season

Don’t wait to check these items off your list and start preparing for the most hectic holiday season as soon as you get the chance. For more tips and information on how to prepare your business for the online holiday shopping season, please contact our commerce experts today.

My last blog analyzed what 5G is exactly. This next installment goes into detail of why banks should care about the new technology and how it affects mobility, payments, pop-up branches, and omnichannel experiences.

Disruption can happen when you least expect it and by seemingly unassuming technologies like cell service. Think about how Uber and Lyft used 4G to disrupt the taxi industry when cell service made it possible to combine maps and apps to make the commuting experience better for everyday consumers. That kind of innovative thinking is how banks need to approach 5G – or risk falling behind.

Banks leading the digital charge experience better financial results than those that follow. Mobile banking continues to be a popular and preferred channel for customer engagement, and despite tremendous advancement in the past decade, banks still have work to do to improve mobile customer satisfaction. There continues to be increasing pressure on banks to deliver better customer services through mobile channels.

5G is an opportunity for banks to transform the ways they interact with customers via mobile, extend banking functions not currently available via mobile into that channel, and bring more robust banking functionality to the next generation of smartphones, wearables, IoT sensors, and virtual reality. The convenience and security enabled by 5G have the promise to make mobile the center of all banking transactions in the future.

Let’s look at just some of the possible enhancements anticipated from 5G.

Mobile Applications That Combine Location Awareness and Augmented Reality

Augmented reality mobile applications have been around for more than a decade (think pointing your camera at a row of shops to display offers from local merchants over the image on the camera), but are not currently in widespread use because they require a lot of processing power, which drains the phone battery. 5G’s low latency and faster data transmission speeds will allow banks to put the intensive processing tasks in the network, keeping performance acceptable, with no choppy video.

Mobile applications can be rearchitected to keep less data on the phone or device, simplifying application architecture to be lighter and more responsive, resulting in fewer versions to support and fewer updates and instantaneous changes across all users. If you think augmented reality is just for gamers and not financial services firms, take a look at what Westpac Bank, Citibank, CapitalOne, and Visa are doing in the space.

Other companies are working on augmented reality applications that facilitate loans through immersive interfaces (pointing your camera at a house and receiving information like neighborhood demographics, median price, buying/selling conditions and monthly loan repayments based on loans the user qualifies), applications that make the experience of retirement planning fun and simple, and applications that introduce and compare products and services.

Pop-up Branches

“Pop-up” branches are an increasingly popular part of many banks’ customer experience strategy. Although choosing a bank is based on more than just it having convenient locations, branch convenience still remains an important consideration across all customer demographics. It’s a great way for banks to test new locations, provide low-cost transactional support where people congregate, implement special event engagement, and optimize their brick-and-mortar branch footprint.

The high speed and responsiveness of 5G makes possible things like facial recognition (which requires checking databases in the cloud) in a pop-up branch that 4G cannot handle. Because 5G will support a robust set of capabilities and augment them with better-performing video communications, pop-up branches can act as mobile platforms, just like food trucks. A pop-up branch will be more like full-service branches where people would have access to the services of a typical branch, including in-person customer service.

True Omnichannel Integration

As 5G becomes more pervasive, opportunities to integrate phone, watch, wearables, and connected cars will allow banks to make all these methods of interaction uniform and thus transform the customer experience.

5G provides the potential for banks to offer virtual personalized services that can streamline and enhance customer service operations across physical and digital channels. By taking advantage of 5G’s ambient computing capabilities, real-time mobile device information (geolocation, etc.) can be provided to CSRs to help personalize recommendations. VR and AR can be used to help customers visualize and understand complex budget or asset allocation strategies, while chatbots and virtual assistants can be augmented with audio and video, and real-time language translations can be embedded in mobile applications.

The combination of 5G, artificial intelligence, and big data will enable real-time information gathering, paving the way for AI-based personalized banking services.

Seamless Instant Loan Processing

5G’s high-speed, real-time data flow will help streamline cumbersome processes that often accompany big-ticket purchases. Faster end-to-end cycle time for things like loan applications to credit checks to personalized financing will enable faster approvals and access to available funds. And, the ability to integrate artificial intelligence, data and real-time parallel processing into mobile applications will improve the speed and accuracy behind lending decisions and optimize lending rates to match each applicant. Mortgage and loan approvals, for example, can use a combination of technologies to securely record property details (geo-mapping location, 360-degree view of the property in real time), scan documents, and calculate risk-profit ratios within seconds from mobile devices.

Mobile Payments

5G will connect more devices at low power, low cost, and with better reliability, leading to an increase in the number of connected devices, ranging from smartphones, wearables, and home appliances to sensors on all types of objects, public infrastructure, and even clothes. All these connected devices will talk to each other and exchange data, enabling payments to be made by phone, earphones, or even sensors on our clothes.

There are many more benefits of 5G, such as enabling access to banking services in historically underserved areas, better fraud prevention, enhanced multimodal biometric security, secure peer-to-peer lending, and targeted personalized offers.

To learn more about what 5G is exactly, why banks should care, the benefits and challenges of the new service, and what banks should be doing to prepare for the change, you can click here or submit the form below.

This blog was co-authored by Jonathan Crockett.